Cities of youth: Post-millennial cases of mobility and sociality

With a focus on cities in eastern and southern Africa, this paper draws on recent scholarship and my own research in Lusaka, Zambia, to analyse pathways for, and challenges to, greater social mobility for youth against the background of economic, political, and spatial processes that are affecting urban livelihoods in the region, facilitating or hindering youth social mobility. The paper describes several forms of sociality that brings young women and men together around music, religion, and recreation, including sex. The solidarities and networks that result from such interactions help young people situate themselves in relation to others at the present and in relationship to the future, shaping the urban dynamic in the process

Your Trash Is Someone's Treasure The Politics of Value at a Michigan Landfill

This article discusses scavenging and dumping as alternative approaches to deriving value from rubbish at a large Michigan landfill. Both practices are attuned to the indeterminacy and power of abandoned things, but in different ways. Whereas scavenging relies on acquiring familiarity with an object by getting to know its particular qualities, landfilling and other forms of mass disposal make discards fungible and manipulable by stripping them of their former identities. By way of examining the different ways in which people become invested in the politics of value at the landfill, whether as part of expressions of gender and class or for personal enjoyment, different comportments toward materiality are revealed to have underlying social and moral implications. In particular, it is argued that different approaches to the evaluation of rubbish involve competing understandings of human and material potential

“Still good life”: On the value of reuse and distributive labor in “depleted” rural Maine

This article explores the production of wealth through distributive labor in Maine\u27s secondhand economy. While reuse is often associated with economic disadvantage, our research complicates that perspective. The labor required to reclaim, repair, redistribute, and reuse secondhand goods provides much more than a means of living in places left behind by international capitalism, but the value generated by this work is persistently discounted by dominant economic logics. On the basis of semistructured interviews, participant observation, and statewide surveys with reuse market participants in Maine, we find that the relational value of reuse, produced through caring, flexible, distributive labor, is especially significant. We argue that paying attention to the practices, politics, and value of distribution is critical for understanding wealth in communities perceived to have been left behind by global capitalist systems, particularly as wage labor opportunities and natural resources grow increasingly scarce

Distant Companions: Servants and Employers in Zambia, 1900–1985

Distant Companions tells the fascinating story of the lives and times of domestic servants and their employers in Zambia from the beginning of white settlement during the colonial period until after independence. Emphasizing the interactive nature of relationships of domination, the book is useful for readers who seek to understand the dynamics of domestic service in a variety of settings. In order to examine the servant- employer relationship within the context of larger political and economic processes, Karen Tranberg Hansen employs an unusual combination of methods, including analysis of historical documents, travelogues, memoirs, literature, and life histories, as well as anthropological fieldwork, survey research, and participant observation

”Not African Enough?” Global Dynamics and Local Contestations over Dress Practice and Fashion Design in Zambia

Africa has been placed on the global fashion map by print and electronic media, movies like the Black Panther, and international and local fashion weeks that are attracting attention to its creative talents.  Embedded in histories of regional and international trade, colonialism, and globalization, fashion in Africa today is diverse and multidirectional, responding to and interacting with transglobal inspirations.  Even then, how to tell this history is a matter of fraught debate that continues to invoke worn-out dichotomies such as African/Western and traditional/modern.  Issues about cultural appropriation and authenticity continue to arise.  Two recent examples serve as illustration:  The book, Not African Enough? (2017), featuring clothes in minimalistic styles created by Kenyan designers intent on stepping beyond the confines of what the world, and Africans, are told it means to dress African, and the description of garments made from print fabrics that are worn widely across most of the continent as ”not African” due to the origin of their manufacturing process in Europe in the mid- to late 1800s.  Views like these prevent us from identifying the inventive autonomy in today’s outpouring of dress and fashion creations as African.  Because the meanings of dress always are context dependent, the usages of both of these dress styles play out together rather than in opposition to one another.  Such processes unfold across Africa, including in countries like Zambia, the focus of this article.  Examining the changing place of African print fabric in fashion design and everyday dress practice involving imported secondhand clothing, I explore how changing historical connections, political and economic forces along with global interconnections are shaping how women dress in Zambia

Distant Companions

Distant Companions tells the fascinating story of the lives and times of domestic servants and their employers in Zambia from the beginning of white settlement during the colonial period until after independence. Emphasizing the interactive nature of relationships of domination, the book is useful for readers who seek to understand the dynamics of domestic service in a variety of settings. In order to examine the servant- employer relationship within the context of larger political and economic processes, Karen Tranberg Hansen employs an unusual combination of methods, including analysis of historical documents, travelogues, memoirs, literature, and life histories, as well as anthropological fieldwork, survey research, and participant observation